


Two Years

by lichtkleid



Category: Rammstein
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-06-10 10:26:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6952909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lichtkleid/pseuds/lichtkleid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It’s been two years of silence but he can’t get used to it. He does miss the light, and he does miss the noise. But Rammstein belongs to the past now."</p><p>After Rammstein, Schneider builds a new life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Years

The dawn is white and strikingly clear: in the opalescence of the sky, it looks as if chalk and milk have painted over the blue. A coat of mist drapes the buildings, above the gentle movement of the Neva River. Their reflection dances in the water, amongst the thin shards of broken ice, oscillating on the tiny waves. Not far away, the cold sun already hits the golden cupolas of a nearby orthodox church. 

Christoph Schneider lays his paintbrush on the canvas once more and he finishes his painting of Saint-Petersburg as the night falls over Berlin. He has always had this fascination for Russia; it has been fueled in his childhood by his education, then in his older years by books and travels. But he finds the land itself so huge, so hard to apprehend, so different from region to region, that he prefers to dream of it through canvas and stories. After all, what is left to dream of is you know it all?

He’s satisfied with this painting. It’s been only two years since he’s been alone with himself, after Rammstein, but he has made unbelievable progress.  
He likes to think that, in some other time, with different circumstances, he could have become a painter.

Wind gushes through his open windows; he shivers as he rinses his hands. But the paint has seeped deep in the fold of his hands, underneath his fingernails, and it taints the water with creamy, golden tones. He watches it go down the drain with an odd sense of fulfillment.  
Then he walks to his window and lights up a cigarette. The silence of the night deafens him. It’s been two years of silence but he can’t get used to it.  
He does miss the light, and he does miss the noise.  
But Rammstein is past now and he has to learn to live without the rush, without the applause and without the travelling.  
He’s the only one of them to live in Berlin still. Paul’s gone off to Estonia after falling in love with Tallinn’s beauty. Olli and Till have retreated in the countryside, up North. Flake doesn’t give much news, as always, but if he’s certain that he hasn’t left Germany, he can’t tell for sure where he lives now. And Richard has left long ago, to found a family in America’s nurturing arms.  
It feels strange to know so little of the lives of the men who were once his family.

His ashes fall down on the pavement. They look like snowflakes, dark snowflakes which dance for a while before accepting their fate and touching the ground. In the building opposite his, he sees the girl of the second floor. He sees her often. She stays up late, leaving her curtains open and her lights on, almost inviting the foreign gaze in. And as the street turns dark in the night, as the candles are blown off, as the lights are shut and the curtains drawn, she’s still in the light.  
He distinguishes her silhouette, but can’t see much more, save for her red, bright hair. She’s sitting straight at her desk, writing something; he lets his imagination wander for a while. Maybe she’s a writer. A scenarist, a journalist, maybe she’s still studying. She might even be writing lyrics for a band.  
He tries to imagine what she’d be like on stage.  
He has seen with Till that shy and reserved people can be unbelievable frontmen; and she does seem mousy. But maybe that’s just an appearance. Maybe she is very outgoing.  
And then she stands, stretches, and closes the curtains. 

The butt of his second cigarette hits the ground, tiny and incandescent. Down on the street, the hurried heels of the last passers hammer on the pavement. They’re impatient to go home, invade Schneider’s field of vision for a second and vanish once more in the world of shadows. He’s not sure they even exist.  
And finally, after a last look at the girl’s flat in which he distinguishes nothing more, he closes his windows and goes back into his own life.  
But sleep doesn’t come easily to him that night. A longing aches in his bones, creeps in his heart, but he doesn’t know what he’s after. He had wished for loneliness and silence for so long, that they turned out to bring him nothing. Maybe they called Rammstein off too soon. Maybe there was still something to accomplish with the band. Maybe their purpose was to last longer.  
He stares at the ceiling and wonders if the men with whom he led this crazy adventure also regret their time of shine.  
And he falls asleep with a smile, knowing that somewhere within the globe, five men have given into sleep with the same question twirling in their brains and it comforts him.

The street is barely awake as he walks down. A translucent layer of snow has covered the pavement during his scarce hours of sleep and it’s falling still. He walks through a magical landscape and regrets that he has seen too much of the world to be still moved by it.  
As he crosses the street, the door of the building opposite him opens and she is here.

She sees him and freezes, very still in her shapeless coat. He notices, weirdly, that her red hair is held together in a bun with a paintbrush. He wonders if she paints, too. She also has high heels, in the snow, like some Russian lady. He opens his mouth to say something, but he suddenly sees a fire igniting the eyes of the girl in front of him; a fire very much alike the one he had in him when he had her age, when he lived in Berlin already but in a much smaller flat, when he hoped that his dreams would somehow blossom into reality.  
So he stares at this girl who’s barely a woman and yet who looks immensely like him, and he finds no words.

“Good morning, Father.” She says; and he drinks her three words as an offering.

He wants to answer, wants to scream, wants to beg her to speak again, but she has already walked past him, towards the U-Bahn station, oscillating on her high heels in the snow. And the daughter he never wanted to raise is now, once again, no one but a stranger.  
Around him, he sees Berlin’s landscape changing slowly, as a snake wriggling out of its scarred skin, and there’s nothing to distract him from the elegy that swells in his heart. Nothing but the brutalist buildings collapsing in the surroundings as huge witnesses of the communist era, nothing but unspoken words that saturate him, nothing but the pointy arrow of the Television Tower, trying to tear at the sky as the steeple of the modern media cathedral. 

And amongst this world of knowledge, he feels very cold in the snow. 

Christoph Schneider lays his gaze on the opening of the U-Bahn station in which his red-haired daughter has disappeared, and he notices that some paint has dried off on his hand. It makes tiny golden scales and he thinks of the painting of Saint-Petersburg by his windows, and it makes him smile.

He misses the light, and he misses the noise, but he feels hope. Maybe someday when he mends the wound of ignorance, his daughter and him will go to Russia together.

**Author's Note:**

> This is of course a work of fiction. The child is fictional.  
> I'm sorry for the English mistakes, I just hope they're not too frequent.  
> Hope you enjoyed this! <3


End file.
